Chapter 5

THE PORTEOUS RIOTS.

[Sidenote: 1736--The gin riots]

A good deal of disturbance and tumult was going on in various parts of the provinces. Some of our readers have probably not forgotten the riots which took place in the early part of the present reign, in consequence of the objection to the turnpike gate system, and in which the rioters took the name of "Rebecca and her daughters." Riots almost precisely similar in origin and character, but much more extensive and serious, were going on in the western counties during the earlier years of George the Second's reign. The rioting began as early as 1730, and kept breaking out here and there for some years. The rioters assembled in various places in gangs of about a hundred. Like "Rebecca and her daughters," they were usually dressed in women's clothes; they had their faces blackened; they were armed with guns and swords, and carried axes, with which to hew down the obnoxious turnpike gates. The county magistrates, with the force at their disposal, were unable at one time to make any head against the rioters. The turnpike gates were undoubtedly a serious grievance, and at that time there was hardly any idea of dealing with a grievance but by the simple process of imprisoning, suppressing, or punishing those who protested too loudly against it.

The Gin riots were another serious disturbance to social order. Gin-drinking had grown to such a height among the middle classes in cities that reformers of all kinds took alarm at it. A Bill was brought into Parliament by Sir Joseph Jekyll, the Master of the Rolls, in 1736, for the purpose of prohibiting the sale of gin, or at least laying so heavy a duty on it as to put it altogether out of {57} the reach of the poor, and absolutely prohibiting its sale in small quantities. The Bill was not a ministerial measure, and indeed Walpole seems to have given it but a cool and half-hearted approval, and the Patriots vehemently opposed it as an unconstitutional interference with individual habits and individual rights. The Bill, however, passed through Parliament and was to come into operation on the 29th of the following September. At first it appears to have created but little popular excitement; but as the time drew near when the Act was to come into operation, and the poorer classes saw themselves face to face with the hour that was to cut them off from their favorite drink, a sudden discontent flashed out in the form of wide-spread riot. Only the most energetic action on the part of the authorities prevented the discontent from breaking into wholesale disturbance.

It does not seem as if the Gin Act did much for the cause of sobriety. Public opinion among the populace was too decidedly against it to allow of its being made a reality. Gin was every day sold under various names, and, indeed, it was publicly sold in many shops under its own name. The Gin Act called into existence an odious crew of common informers who used to entrap people into the selling and drinking of gin in order to obtain their share of the penalty, or, perhaps, in some cases to satisfy a personal spleen. The mob hated the common informers as bitterly as a well-dressed crowd at a race-course in our own time hates a "welsher." When the informer was got hold of by his enemies he was usually treated very much after the fashion in which the welsher is handled to-day.

It would be needless to say that the Gin Act and the agitation concerning it called also into existence a whole literature of pamphlets, ballads, libels, and lampoons. The agitation ran its course during some two years, more than once threatened to involve the country in serious disturbance, and died out at last when the legislation which had caused so much tumult was quietly allowed to become a dead letter.

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Suddenly Edinburgh became the theatre of a series of dramatic events which made her, for the moment, the centre of interest to the political world. It is, perhaps, a sufficient proof of the delicate condition of the relations between the two countries that the arrest of two smugglers came within measurable distance of awaking civil war. These two smugglers, Wilson and Robertson, being under sentence of death, made, while in church under armed escort, a desperate effort to escape. Wilson, a man of great strength, by holding two soldiers with his hand, and a third with his teeth, gave Robertson the chance, which he gladly seized, of plunging into the crowd of the dispersing congregation, and vanishing into space.

[Sidenote: 1736--John Porteous]

The Edinburgh magistrates, alarmed at the escape, offended by the display of popular sympathy with the escaped smuggler, and fearing, not, as it was said, without good cause, that an attempt would be made to rescue the single-minded and not unheroic Wilson, resolved to take all possible precautions to insure the carrying out of the sentence of the law. To do this the more effectively they ordered out nearly the whole of their own city guard under the command of Captain Porteous, and in doing so made one of the greatest mistakes recorded in their annals.

Captain John Porteous was in his way and within his sphere a remarkable man. He belonged to that large crew of daring, resolute, and unscrupulous adventurers who, under happy conditions, become famous free companions, are great in guerilla wars, make excellent explorers, and even found colonies and lay the foundations of States, but who, under less auspicious stars, are only a terror to the peaceable and an example to the law-abiding. To the romancist, to the dramatist, the character of such a man as John Porteous is intensely attractive; even in the graver ways of history he claims the attention imperatively, and stands forward with a decisive distinctness that lends to him an importance beyond his deserts. {59} His life had been from the beginning daring, desperate, and reckless. He was the son of a very respectable Edinburgh citizen, who was also a very respectable tailor, and whose harmless ambition it was to make the wild slip of his blood a respectable tailor in his turn. Never was the saying "Like father, like son" more astonishingly belied. Young John Porteous would have nothing to do with the tailor's trade. He was dissipated, he was devil-may-care; there was nothing better to be done with him than to ship him abroad into the military service of some foreign State, the facile resource in those days for getting rid of the turbulent and the troublesome. John Porteous went into foreign service; he entered the corps known as the Scotch-Dutch, in the pay of the States of Holland, and plied the trade of arms.

Time went on, and in its course it brought John Porteous back to Edinburgh. Here his military training served the city in good stead during the Jacobite rising of 1715. He disciplined the city guard and got his commission as its captain. But, if wanderings and foreign service had turned the tailor's son into a stout soldier, they had in no degree mended his morality or bettered his reputation. Edinburgh citizenship has always been commended for keeping a strict eye to the respectabilities, and the standard of public and private decorum was held puritanically high in the middle of the last century; but even in the most loose-lived of European cities, even in the frankest freedom of barracks or of camp, John Porteous, if his reputation did not belie him, might have been expected to hold his own among the profligate and the brutal. It seems to be uncertain whether he was the more remarkable for his savage temper or for the dissolute disorder of his life. Naturally enough, perhaps in obedience to that law of contrast which seems so often to preside over the destinies of such men, his appearance did not jump with his nature. We read that he was of somewhat portly habit, by no means tall; that his face was rather benign than otherwise, and that his eyes suggested a sleepy {60} mildness. Such as he was, he had lived a queer, wild life, but its queerest and its wildest scenes were now to come in swift succession before the end.

[Sidenote: 1736--Scene at an execution]

The city guard, of which Porteous was the commander, were scarcely more popular than their chief. Ferguson, the luckless tavern-haunting poet, the François Villon of Edinburgh, the singer whose genius some critics believe to be somewhat unfairly overshadowed by the greater fame of Burns, has branded them to succeeding generations as "black banditti." They were some 120 in number; they were composed of veteran soldiers, chiefly Highlanders; they were considered by such of the Edinburgh population as often came into conflict with them to be especially ferocious in their fashion of preserving civic order. Captain John Porteous seems to have found them men after his own heart, to have been very proud of them, and to have considered that they and he together were equal to coping with any emergency that a disturbed Edinburgh might present. He was therefore deeply affronted when the magistrates, after according to him and his men the duty of guarding the scaffold on which Wilson was to die, considered it necessary for the further preservation of peace and the overawing of any possible attempt at rescue to order a regiment of Welsh fusileers to be drawn up in the principal street of the city. Wrath at the escape of Robertson, and indignation at the slight which he conceived to be put upon him and his men, acting upon his old hatred for his enemies, the Edinburgh mob, seems to have whipped the fierce temper of Porteous into wholly ungovernable fury. The execution took place under peculiarly painful conditions. Porteous insisted on inflicting needless torture upon the unhappy Wilson by forcing upon his wrists a pair of handcuffs that were much too small for the purpose. When Wilson remonstrated, and urged that the pain distracted his thoughts from those spiritual reflections which were now so peremptory, Porteous is said to have replied with wanton ruffianism that such reflections would matter very {61} little, since Wilson would so soon be dead. The prisoner is reported to have answered with a kind of prophetic dignity that his tormentor did not know how soon he might in his turn have to ask for himself the mercy which he now refused to a fellow-being. With these words, almost the latest on his lips, the smuggler went to his death and met it with a decent courage.

While the execution took place no signs were shown on the part of the great crowd that had assembled of any desire to rescue the prisoner. But the sentence had hardly been carried out when the temper of the mob appeared to change. Stones were thrown, angry cries were raised, and the mob, as if animated by a common purpose, began to press around the scaffold. One man leaped upon the gibbet and cut the rope by which the body was suspended; others gathered round as if to carry off the body. Then it is asserted that Porteous completely lost his head. The passion that had been swaying him all day entirely overmastered him. He is said to have snatched a musket from the hands of the soldier nearest to him, to have yelled to his men to fire, and to have shown the example by pointing his own piece and shooting one of the crowd dead.

Whether Porteous gave the order or not, it is certain that the attack upon the gibbet was followed by a loose fire from the guard which killed some six or seven persons and wounded many others. Then Porteous made an attempt to withdraw his men, and as they were moving up the High Street the now infuriated mob again attacked, and again the guards fired upon the people, and again men were killed and wounded. Thus, as it were, fighting his way, Porteous got his men to their guard-house.

The popular indignation was so great that the Edinburgh authorities put Porteous upon his trial. Porteous defended himself vigorously, denied that he had ever given an order to fire, denied that he had ever fired his piece, proved that he had exhibited his piece to the magistrates immediately after the occurrence unused and still loaded. This defence was met by the counter-assertion {62} that the weapon Porteous had used was not his own, but one seized from the hands of a soldier. A large number of persons gave evidence that they heard Porteous give the order to fire, that they saw him level and discharge the piece he had seized, and that they had seen his victim fall. After a lengthy trial Porteous was found guilty and sentenced to death.

[Sidenote: 1736--Attacking the Tolbooth]

The sentence was received with practically general approval in Edinburgh, but with very different feelings in London. The Queen, who was acting as regent in the absence of George II., felt especially strongly upon the subject. Lamentable as the violence of Captain Porteous had been, it was still urged that he had acted in obedience to a sense of duty. It was feared, too, that the sufficiently lawless attitude of the lower population of Edinburgh towards authority would be gravely and dangerously intensified if so signal an example were to be made of an officer whose offence was only committed under conditions of grave provocation and in the face of an outbreak which might well appear to resemble riot. The Government in London came to the conclusion that it would not do to hang John Porteous, and a message was sent by the Duke of Newcastle notifying her Majesty's pleasure that Porteous should have a reprieve for a period of six weeks--a preliminary step to the consequent commutation of the death sentence.

But, if the Government in London proposed to reprieve Porteous, the wild democracy of Edinburgh were not willing to lose their vengeance so lightly. The deaths caused by the discharge of the pieces of Porteous's men had aroused the most passionate resentment in Edinburgh. Men of all classes, those directly affected by the deaths of friends and relatives, and those who looked upon the quarrel from an attitude of unconcerned justice, alike agreed in regarding Porteous's sentence as righteous and deserved; now, alike, they agreed in resenting the interference of the Queen, and the apparently inevitable escape of Porteous from the consequences of his crime.

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What followed fills one of the most dramatic of all the many dramatic pages in the history of Edinburgh town. John Porteous was imprisoned in the Tolbooth, in the very thick of the city. Some of his friends, stirred by fears which if vague were not imaginary, urged him to petition to the authorities to be removed to the Castle, perched safe aloft upon its rock. But Porteous, filled with a false security, and rejoicing in the reprieve that had arrived from London, took no heed of the warnings. Perhaps, like the Duke of Guise on something of a like occasion, he would, if warned that there was any thought of taking his life, have answered, secure in the sanctity of the old Tolbooth, in the historic words, "They would not dare." Porteous remained in the old Tolbooth; he gave an entertainment in honor of his reprieve to certain privileged friends; he was actually at supper, with the wine going round and round, and his apartment noisy with talk and laughter, when the jailer entered the room with a pale face and a terrible tale. Half Edinburgh was outside the Tolbooth, armed and furious, their one demand for the person of Porteous, their one cry for his life.

The tale was strange enough to seem incredible even to minds more sober than those of Porteous and his companions, but it was perfectly true. Edinburgh had risen in the most mysterious way. From all parts of the town bands of men had come together; the guard-house of the city guard had been seized upon, the guards disarmed, and their weapons distributed among the conspirators. In a very short space of time Edinburgh was in the hands of an armed and determined mob; the magistrates, who attempted to enforce their authority, were powerless, and the crowd, with a unanimity which showed how well their plans had been preconcerted, directed all their energies to effecting an entrance into the Tolbooth. This proved at first exceedingly difficult. The great gate seemed to defy the force of all the sledge-hammer strokes that could be rained against it, and its warders were obstinate alike to the demands and the threats of the besiegers. But some {64} one in the ranks of the besiegers suggested fire, and through fire the Tolbooth fell. Fagots were piled outside the great gate and lighted, and the bonfire was assiduously fed until at last the great gate was consumed and the rioters rushed to their purpose over the glowing embers and through the flying sparks.

[Sidenote: 1736--A "respectable" mob]

They found Porteous in his apartment, deserted by his companions, dizzy with the fumes of wines, and helpless with the horror of the doom that menaced him. He might perhaps have escaped when the first alarm was sounded, but, as he lost his head before through passion, so he seems to have lost it again now through dismay. The poor wretch had indeed at the last moment, when it was too late, sought refuge in the chimney of his room; his flight was stopped by a grating a little way up; to this grating he clung, and from this grating he was plucked away by his assailants. In a few moments he was carried into the open air, was borne, the bewildered, despairing, struggling centre of all that armed and merciless mass, swiftly towards the Netherbow. In the midst of the blazing torches, the Lochaber axes, the guns and naked swords, that hemmed him in, the helpless, hopeless victim was swept along. A rope was readily found, but a gibbet was not forthcoming; a byer's pole served at the need. Within a little while after the forcing of the Tolbooth gate, Porteous was hanged and dead, and his wild judges were striking at his lifeless body with their weapons. It is said, and we may well believe it, that Porteous died, when he found that he had to die, bravely enough, as became a soldier. In that wild, mad life of his he had faced many perils, and if he pleaded for his life with his self-ordained executioners while there was any chance that pleading might prevail, it is likely enough that he accepted the inevitable with composure. Wilson was avenged; the victims of the fusillade of the city guard had been atoned for by blood, and Edinburgh had asserted with a ferocity all her own that England's will was not her will, and England's law not her law.

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The peculiar characteristics of the crowd that battered down the Tolbooth gate and carried off Porteous to his death in the Grassmarket were its orderliness, its singleness of purpose, and the curious "respectability," if such a term may be employed, of its composition. Its singleness of purpose and its orderliness were alike exemplified by the way in which it went about its grim business and by the absolute absence of all riot or pillage of any kind, or indeed of any sort of violence beyond that essential to the carrying out of its intent. No peaceable persons were molested; no buildings other than the Tolbooth were broken into; the very rope which hanged the unhappy Porteous was immediately and amply paid for. No one except the central victim of the conspiracy received harm at the hands of the mob. The "respectability" of a large proportion of the mob and of those controlling its actions was afterwards vouched for in many ways. Ladies told tales of their carriages being stopped by disguised individuals of courteous bearing and marked politeness, who with the most amiable apologies turned their horses' heads from the scene of action. It was afterwards reported and commonly believed that the Edinburgh authorities knew more about the purpose of the self-appointed executions than was consonant with a due regard for law and order. In fact, if the passions of the mob were aroused they were undoubtedly organized, directed, and held in check by those who knew well how to command, and to give to an illegal act the gravity and decorum of legality.

News travelled slowly in those days. There were no telegrams, no special editions, no newspapers, to tell the Londoner in the morning of the grim deed that had been done in Edinburgh overnight. But when the news did come it certainly startled London, and it raised up a perfect passion of rage, a _hysterica passio_, in the heart and brain of one person. That person was the Queen, who had herself specially ordered the reprieve of the condemned man. Queen Caroline's reason seemed for the {66} moment to be wellnigh unhinged by her anger at the news. She uttered the wildest threats, and talked vehemently of inflicting all manner of impossible punishment upon Edinburgh for the offences of its mob.

[Sidenote: 1737--Scottish dignity]

Fortunately for the maintenance of peace between the two countries, the question of the justice or the injustice of Porteous's fate was not to be settled by the caprice of an irritated woman. In obedience, however, to the Queen's wishes, the Government introduced into the House of Lords, in April, 1737, a Bill the terms of which proposed to disable the Lord Provost of Edinburgh, Alexander Wilson, "from taking, holding, or enjoying any office or place of magistracy in the city of Edinburgh, or elsewhere in Great Britain, and for imprisoning the said Alexander Wilson, and for abolishing the town guard kept up in the said city, commonly called the Town Guard, and for taking away the gates of the Netherbow port of the said city, and keeping open the same." The Bill was the occasion of long and bitter debates, in which Lord Carteret made himself the most conspicuous advocate of the Government measure, and the Duke of Argyll acted as the chief champion of the Scotch peers, who resolutely opposed it. The debate was curious and instructive, in serving to show the extreme delicacy of the relations between England and Scotland, and the difficulties presented by the differences between the Scotch law and the English law. Porteous was tried and condemned naturally by Scotch law, and many, if not most, of the English advocates of the Bill seemed to find it hard to put it out of their heads that because the trial was not conducted in accordance with the principles of English legislation it could possibly be a fair or a just trial.

If the Bill was calculated to irritate the susceptibilities of the Scotch peers, there were attendant circumstances still more irritating. The three Scotch judges were summoned from Scotland to answer certain legal questions connected with the debate. On their arrival a fresh debate sprang up on the question whether they should be {67} examined at the Bar of the House of Lords or upon the wool-sacks. The Scotch peers considered it disrespectful to their judges to be examined at the Bar of the House of Lords, and urged some of their arguments against it in terms of ominous warning. It is curious to find a speaker in this debate telling the Government that the strength of the legal union that existed between England and Scotland depended entirely upon the way in which the people of Scotland were treated by the majority in the two Houses. If any encroachment be made, the speaker urged, on those articles which have been stipulated between the two countries, the legal union will be of little force: the Scotch people will be apt to ascribe to the present royal family all the ills they feel or imagine they feel; and if they should unanimously join in a contrary interest they would be supported by a powerful party in England as well as by a powerful party beyond the seas. For such reasons the speaker urged that any insult, or seeming insult, to the people of Scotland was especially to be avoided, and any disrespect to the Scotch judges would be looked upon by the whole nation as a violation of the Articles of Union and an indignity to the Scottish people.

The use of such words in the House of Lords within two-and-twenty years of the rising of 1715 ought to have been found most significant. No one who was present and who heard those words could guess indeed that within eight more years Scotland and England would witness a rising yet more formidable than that of the Old Pretender, a rising which would put for a moment in serious peril the Hanoverian hold of the throne. But they might well have been accepted as of the gravest import by those who voted for the attendance of the Scotch judges at the Bar of the House of Lords, and who carried their point by a majority of twelve.

The question of the judges being settled, the debate on the Bill went on, and the measure was read a third time, on Wednesday, May 11th, and passed by a majority of fifty-four to twenty-two. On the following Monday, May 16th, {68} the Bill was sent down to the House of Commons, where it occasioned debates even warmer than the debates in the Upper House. The Scotch opposition was more successful in the Commons than it had been in the Lords. So strenuously was the measure opposed that at one time it seemed likely to be lost altogether, and was only saved from extinction by a casting vote. When at last it was read a third time, on June 13th, it was a very different measure, in name and in form, from the Bill which had come down from the Peers a month earlier. The proposal to abolish the Edinburgh city guard and to destroy the gate of the Netherbow port disappeared from the Bill, and the proposed punitive measures finally resolved themselves into the infliction of a fine of two thousand pounds upon the city of Edinburgh, and the declaration that the provost, Alexander Wilson, was incapable of holding office. Such was the pacific conclusion of a controversy that at one time seemed likely to put a dangerous strain upon the amicable relations between the two countries. It may indeed be shrewdly suspected that the memory of the Porteous mob, and of the part which the Hanoverian Queen and the Whig Government played in connection with it, may have had no small share in fanning the embers of Jacobite enthusiasm in Scotland in swelling the ranks of the sympathizers with King James and Prince Charles over the water, and in precipitating the insurrectionary storm which was to make memorable the name of the Forty-five. Perhaps to the world at large the most momentous result of that wild and stormy episode is to be found in the enchanting fiction which has illuminated, with the genius of Walter Scott, the stirring scenes of the Porteous riots, and has lent an air of heroic dignity and beauty to the obscure smuggler, George Robertson. It is the happy privilege of the true romancer to find history his handmaid, and to make obscure events immortal, whether they be the scuffles of Greeks and barbarians outside a small town in Asia Minor, or the lynching of a dissolute adventurer by an Edinburgh mob at the Grassmarket.

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